"Look for the quantum leap," advised Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of General Electric. Make surprise moves – shock your rivals. Shake things up while other look on from the sidelines, sitting idly by while you knock your competitors for a loop. The three critical ingredients of the quantum leap are surprise, boldness, and shock.

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Enterprise-wide business process management (EBPM)

Running a business without an enterprise business process plan is analogous to preparing for a big game with only a roster of key players, no play-book and no practice... Business process thinking is predicated upon the central belief that it is fundamentally the complex, cross-departmental, technology-enabled business process that create value for customers and shareholders.

EBPM is a deliberate and collaborative approach to systematically – and systemically – managing all of a company's business processes. A process-managed enterprise supports, empowers and energizes employees, encourages their initiative, enables and allows its people to perform process work.

This predication assumes that every significant management activity should begin with an analysis of customers' needs and have, as an intrinsic objective, the shared understanding of the key business processes or organizational capabilities that are critical to satisfying those needs.

Two components of sustainable growth strategy

Sustainable business growth strategy is a practical approach to achieving top-line growth and bottom-line results.

Growing is less risky than not growing

A sustainable growth strategy, based on rightly defined customer needs, is far less risky than rearranging the furniture while a competitor grows at your expense.

Growing is a creative game

Growing requires entrepreneurial creativity, curiosity, imagination, and emotional energy – qualities that exist, and even abound, among the people in your company. These qualities may not be visible, but enormous amounts of dormant creative potential flow in the companies we see – once the leadership frees them up.

What makes a healthy company?

Most companies are not focusing enough on managing the health of their businesses. There are several generic components of a healthy company – a robust and credible strategy; productive, well-maintained assets; innovative systems, structures, products, services, and processes; a fine reputation with customers, investors, regulators, governments, and other stakeholders; and the ability to attract, retain, develop, inspire and energize high-performing talent.

Thinking about health, as opposed to long-term performance, helps management teams understand how to look after companies today in a way that will ensure that they remain strong in the future. It focuses the mind on what must be done today to deliver the outcome of long-term performance.

Balanced Growth

Balanced growth is a key to prosperity in the new economy. Sustainable growth – growth for the long haul – requires meticulous attention to the basics: cost structure, quality, product development cycle time, productivity, asset utilization, investment of capital, supply chain innovation, customer service satisfaction, and all other components of operational excellence. Neverending focus on these generates the resources for growth.

Organizational capability approach

An organizational capability approach nurtures three of the most critical factors essential to achieve superior, sustainable results:

strategic focus,
organizational alignment,
operating discipline.

Conversely, taking action to achieve strategic focus, organizational alignment, and operating discipline develops capability thinking.

Resource-based model

The currently dominant view of business strategy – resource-based theory – is based on the concept of economic rent and the view of the company as a collection of capabilities. This view of strategy has a coherence and integrative role that places it well ahead of other mechanisms of strategic decision making.

The resource based view of strategy emphasizes economic rent creation through distinctive capabilities. Economic rent, or Economic Value Added (EVA), is what companies earn over and above the cost of the capital employed in their business. It is the measure of the competitive advantage, and competitive advantage is the only means by which companies in competitive markets can earn economic rent. The objective of a company is to increase its economic rent, rather than its profit as such. A company which increases its profits but not its economic rent - as through investments or acquisitions which yield less than the cost of capital - destroys value. The perspective of economic rent forces the question 'why can't competitors do that?' into discussion.

Sustainable competitive advantage

Sustainable competitive advantage is the prolonged benefit of implementing some unique value-creating strategy based on unique combination of internal organizational resources and capabilities that cannot be replicated by competitors. Sustainable competitive advantage allows the maintenance and improvement of your enterprise's competitive position in the market. It is an advantage that enables your business to survive against its competition over a long period of time.

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Sustainable business models

Sustainable business success is based not on great ideas, guts, or instinct alone – but on your ability to create an master your business model. In the new era of unrelenting change and competition, your face a daunting challenge: how to sustain the business model of your firm.

Sadly, mature companies often forget or forsake the thing that made them successful in the first place: a customer-centric business model. They lose focus on the customer and start focusing on the bottom line and quarterly results. They look for ways to cut costs or increase revenues, often at the expense of the customer. They forget that satisfying customer needs and continuous value innovation is the only path to sustainable growth. This creates opportunities for new, smaller companies to emulate and improve upon what made their bigger competitors successful in the first place and steal their customers.

The fact is, no matter how bulletproof your firm's current business model, it will be challenged by new business models. The new reality is that business models have shorter shelf life. You must constantly attempt to discover new business models if you hope to survive and grow.

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Harnessing the power of change

One of the keys to dealing with change is understanding that change in never over. Change brings opportunity to those who can grasp it, and the discontinuities of the new economy offer unlimited opportunities.For truly adaptive firms, a rapidly changing environment becomes a strategic advantage.

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Market focus

Do more with less - focus on something that is not just different from the rest, but something you can continue to deliver better than anyone else. And continue delivering it! Don't get sidetracked into growth by category extensions and businesses you don't belong in.

Developing sustainable growth strategy from the outside in

In the outside-in company, as opposed to inside-out one, the key word is need, not product. Their people think expansively. They observe people, they're totally immersed in the minds of their customers, looking for ways to expand demand. Their business plans and value propositions derive from the marketplace, based on the knowledge gathered at ground level. Often, the needs they define haven't yet been identified by the customers themselves.

Resegmenting your markets

Innovative segmentation and resegmentation of your target market is the starting point of your sustainable profitable growth. Any market is the sum of many segments. Each segment fulfills a need, and these needs are constantly changing. There are many ways to segment a market. You can resegment a market by consumer age, culture, motivation and buying behavior, customer value sets, value proposition, technology, price points, distribution channels, line extensions, and the like. You can also define a new segment, i.e. define a customer need that nobody else has thought of or addressed before. When you break your market down into segments, you've got a powerful methodology for developing insights into customer needs and generating growth ideas. Think expansively, observe people, learn everything you can about customers' needs, including those that the customers haven't yet identified. Think outside-the-box to generate market stretching concepts that will change the name of the game.

Case study: sustainable growing business - Nike

Nike has continuously expanded its market through segmentation. In mid-eighties, Nike was blindsided by Reebok. Reebok came with stylish shoes for the so-called athlesure market and had begun to segment the consumer marketplace, designing specific shoes for women's aerobics. Nike's market share fell by almost half. Nike decided to define new market segments. It's Air Jordan basketball shoe became wildly successful. By 1992, Nike had three distinct segments based on the for different styles of playing basketball. The tool of segmentation transformed Nike. As sales and market share rebounded, the company went on to create similar segments in tennis. Nike has grown by developing new market segments and moving into adjacent ones. It sliced up the fitness marketplace into many segments capturing nearly half of the U.S. athletic footwear market and expanding around the world. It diversified in related business areas such as apparel and accessories and opened retail stores. From 1995 through 1997, Nike sales grew at an annual average rate of 39% and profits at a 41% rate.

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Leveraging your service-profit chain

The service-profit chain is a powerful phenomenon that stresses the importance of people – both employees and customers – and how linking them can leverage corporate performance. Creating a work environment that encourages rapid response to customers' needs and attentive follow-through is the key to leveraging the power of the service-profit chain. This is only possible when people are empowered to make decisions and are motivated to solve problems. By encouraging employees to go beyond the literal boundaries of their jobs – to make suggestions for improvement – you gain not just a part, but the full potential of their contributions to the business.

Entrepreneurial approach

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs. Doing new things, or doing old things in new ways is how entrepreneurs exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy; they always search for change, respond to it, and exploit it as an opportunity.

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Apply the 80/20 principle to business

The key theme of the 80/20 Principle applied to business is how to create the greatest stakeholder value and generate most money with the least expenditure of assets and efforts. Any individual business can gain immensely through practical application of this Principle. The most important use of the 80/20 Principle is to isolate where you are really making the profits and, just as important, where you are loosing money. Every business person thinks they know this already, and nearly all are wrong. If they had the right picture, their whole business would be transformed.

The game is to spot the few places where you are making great surpluses – be that a product, a market, a customer type, a technology, a distribution channel, a department, a country, a type of transaction, an employee, or a team – and to maximize them; and to identify the places where you are loosing and get out.

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Growing in the knowledge economy

Because in today's knowledge economy growth is based increasingly on knowledge, not on hardware, it offers unprecedented opportunities and ease of market entry especially through Internet. No company, however big, has more than a minuscule share of the endlessly evolving growth markets. Any company, no matter how small, can reach out to catch the attention of a liberated global consumer.

Inclusive approach

At the heart of the inclusive approach is the belief that understanding stakeholder needs – the needs of customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, society, and the environment – and incorporating them into enterprise strategy are central to the achievement of sustainable growth and competitiveness.

Improving business performance: virtuous circles

Various business performance improvement approaches focus on alternative ways to build and run a company. The concept of “virtuous circles” is one of them. It has all those contributing to value creation for the customer pulling forcibly in the same direction. In practice, this also means identifying and balancing short- and long-term goal structures for all stakeholders and changing management incentive schemes to promote long-term sustainable performance.

Differentiation strategy

Hypercompetition is a key feature of a new economy. With the enormous competition markets today are driven by choice: your targeted customers have too many choices, all of which can be fulfilled instantly. Choosing among multiple options is always based on differences, implicit or explicit, so you ought to differentiate in order to give the customer a reason to chose your product or service. Thus, differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage. It is not discretionary.

Venture strategies

The most successful companies are those that have developed aggressive venture strategies and have made ventures critical components of their strategic and operating success. For today's corporations, traditional internal expansions, efficiency improvements and "synergistic" acquisitions are no longer sufficient sources of growth in most industry segments that had grown crowded and hypercompetitive. The new challenge is to search for emerging "white space" opportunities, new-business creations that would meet the unmet, unserved needs of customers in emerging markets.

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Bunsha – a japanese model of successful business growth

Bunsha means company division. In practice in means routinely spinning off companies from the core group. Rather than building a single, giant, and therefore bureaucratic, firm, Bunsha managers divide it and then keep on dividing. Always keeping each of their firms at its optimum size.

Innovation in business

Innovation is the key driver of competitive advantage, growth, and profitability. There are many parts of the whole field of innovation: strategy innovation, new product development, creative approaches to problem solving, idea management, suggestion systems, etc. All of these components are important. Yet approaching them piecemeal will bring piecemeal results. These seemingly disparate issues must be integrated into a single overarching strategy if they are to be mobilized in the quest for growth. In this new era of systemic innovation, you must design your firm's innovation process holistically.

Sustainable competitive advantage may result from those innovations which are consistent with the firm's culture, people, processes, systems, and technologies, and provide some distinct value to customers, either directly or indirectly. More than three-quarters of CEOs of fast-growing companies cited innovation as their strongest competitive advantage, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey.

Sustainable innovation system

The Innovation System model synthesizes and defines the core elements of innovation, their behavior and interaction. The power of this good model makes it easier to understand complex issues and dynamics of innovation, separate its elements and examine them is greater depth. It establishes a framework that helps you to demystify the innovation process and its driving forces, to reveal the unique innovation practices of market champions and understand what makes them so successful and unique.

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Managing innovation versus managing operations

Innovation is a learning process, the product of which is new applied knowledge. Operations is an established process driven by existing knowledge. Operations generate today's value, while innovation creates tomorrow's opportunities. The primary difference between operations and innovation is uncertainty. It eludes planning, prediction and containment.

Managing innovation is quite different from managing operations. Managing uncertainty inherent in innovation requires specific tools and thinking. Innovation is a learning process, the product of which is new applied knowledge. Operations is an established process driven by existing knowledge. Operations generate today's value, while innovation creates tomorrow's opportunities. The most important differentiation between operations and innovation is uncertainty.

Establishing institutional excellence

The leaders of great companies are not just great at growing profits. Most importantly, they are organizational architects determined to establish institutional excellence for as long as the company is in business. When institutional excellence is in place, companies can achieve industry leadership for decades and generations.

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Harnessing your people power

People as your most important asset. Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors. No one, however, can match your highly charged, motivated people who care. People are your firm's repository of knowledge and they are central to your company's competitive advantage. Well educated, coached, and highly motivated people are critical to the development and execution of strategies, especially in today's faster-paced, more perplexing world, where top management alone can no longer assure your firm's competitiveness.

Relentless growth attitude

Establishing an attitude of relentless growth is what enables an organization and its people to achieve their goals. The spirit of relentless growth keeps fresh ideas flowing and reinvigorates your company.

The Relentless Growth Attitude establishes a context within which corporate executives lead by setting direction, creating strategy, securing resources, defining organization architecture , and ensuring that learning occurs. The Growth Attitude should start at the top and work its way down your organization.

Using an innovation portfolio

The innovation portfolio provides visibility that allows your firm pace the introduction of new products and services. You should balance the introduction of revolutionary products with incremental improvements in others so as to maintain a steady flow. By having a comprehensive view of your initiatives over time, you can avoid either overwhelming or underwhelming the marketplace.

Moving with speed – staying ahead of your competition

In the new economy where everything is moving faster and it's only going to get faster, the new mantra is, "Do it more with less and do it faster". If you wish to stay ahead of your competition, you should learn how to move with speed and build four main fast-moving competencies: fast thinking, fast decision-making, getting to market faster, and sustaining speed.

In order to get real speed decisions at virtually every level must be made in minutes, not days or weeks. Decisions also have to be made face-to-face, not memo-to-memo. This means that people have to think on their feet, and that the forests of meaningless paper trails and approvals – so common in large organizations – must be eliminated.

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FutureStep – new strategic management process

FutureStep is a new strategic management process that helps companies, especially large multinational organizations, integrate flexibility and responsiveness into every aspect of their activities. The FutureStep process is aimed at enabling organizations to meet the challenges of navigating a complex and uncertain future environment, by helping them to evolve as complex, intelligence systems. It focuses on what an organization can do in the present to increase its ability to operate in a sustainable way in the future.

Eco-effectiveness in business

Environmental issues and eco-effectiveness are increasingly reflected in business decisions. No business that strives to remain competitive, open to new markets and new opportunities can afford to ignore the global demands for environmental quality. Concepts and tools such as cleaner production, life-cycle assessment (LCA), design for environment (DfE) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) are rapidly becoming key tools for forward-thinking corporations.